Hound of Eden Omnibus

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Shut the-”

  “No! You shut the fuck up!” I felt the parasite strain in my chest and belly as a wave of aborted power surged and was immediately cut off. “Vanya was about to rape this man on the table. He was going to rape and murder him after he swore his vows to this crazy fucking cult – which, I might add, Lily and Dru were almost certainly part of. I just saved Angkor’s life after Mason turned into some kind of fucked up mutant beast and tried to kill me, and you. And if you can’t handle the truth, then that is not. My. Problem.”

  “Let me get a word in, will you?” Jenner’s entire face trembled with tics, and she opened her mouth to say something just as Duke transformed from leopard to nude human male. I was so furious that I didn’t even care that all three of them were naked.

  “No. Fuck you all. I don’t care.” I caught sight of Vanya just as he tried to get up and limp away, and I kicked him right in the exit wound just for the spite of it. He pitched back down with a squeal. “I’m sick of him and I’m sick of all of you. So take your Spook and apologize to him for whatever fucked up shit they’ve done to him, and fuck back off to Screw-Up Town while I go and live my GOD-damn life somewhere else!”

  “Hey. Alexi.” Zane called from up the back of the room.

  “He killed Vassily!” I screamed back at him. “And you think I had something to do with this?! They killed the only people who ever mattered to me!”

  As my voice bounced off the walls like gunfire and faded into stunned silence, a clicking sound began to echo through the room. I looked down. Vanya was laughing underneath me. A horrible fake, forced, repetitive laugh.

  “Laugh it up, fatty.” Jenner said. “You’re gonna wish we killed you before tonight’s through.”

  I had never wanted to do anything more than what I was about to do. I didn’t look at her. “No. Take Angkor and leave.”

  “I’m not gonna do that,” Jenner replied. “Mason-”

  “I don’t want anything to do with you anymore. This is between my people and me,” I replied, as crisply as I could with twelve pieces of glass stuck through my torso and limbs. As the battle fury began to lift, I was stiffening up, beginning to feel the pain. The one in my forearm had gone all the way through. “And if you don’t fucking leave, now, I’m going to kill every fucking person in this room.”

  “Jenner…” Zane spoke up again, moving closer to us. “Just leave him.”

  “No. I’m not leaving.” She lowered her head, eyes narrowed. “You’re coming with us, Alexi. We’re doing this together.”

  “I don’t take orders from you.” I bared my teeth at her, warring with the dual urge to make good on the promise to wipe the room, and rope them in to help me with Vanya. I wasn’t going to be able to carry him in my current state.

  She rolled her eyes. “Look. Just forget it, okay? I lashed out. My old man’s dead and your friend’s dead, and I lost my shit and you’re right, you don’t take orders from me. Alright?”

  In the pregnant pause after her almost-apology, Binah jumped onto the altar and began to nose the bodybag and its concealed occupant, meowing plaintively.

  “You ain’t getting nothing from me,” Vanya slurred in English. “Stupid cunts. You’re dead. Every fuckin’ soldier in this city is gonna come for you. Deacon’s gonna come for you. You’re fuckin’ dead!”

  “Your new friends ran, Vanya.” As much as I could with one shaking hand and a body full of broken glass, I straightened my shirt and tie. “And now, you will tell us about Lily and Dru Ross and their children.”

  “I ain’t telling you shit,” he said. “The fuck you gonna do? Sergei told me he cut you off. You ain’t no fuckin’ wizard no more.”

  The three Weeders in the room shifted restlessly, but I forced myself to stay fixated on Vanya. “I don’t need magic to make your life a living hell for the next year, Vanya. All I need is a quiet room, a battery, and some copper wire. Just you and me and some electrified exploration of your intimate places. Do you think you’ll cry, Kommandant?”

  He spat at me. Jenner stalked across, and slapped him so hard that his neck cracked. He fell to the ground, coughing, while the tiny woman shook her hand out and hauled him up to his knees with unnatural strength. The wiry muscles of her torso stood in sharp relief. “You can count me in on this fat fuck.”

  “Nice tits.” Vanya leered.

  Jenner kicked him in the bullet wounds on his leg. Vanya howled in agony.

  “Fucking prick.” Jenner dragged him off by the front of his shirt as if he weighed thirty pounds instead of three hundred, kicking broken glass out of her way. Duke stumbled on past, and I whistled to him. He turned, and I threw him the Glock. He caught it, gave me the thumbs-up, and joined his President as she maneuvered Vanya out the door and threw him down the first flight of stairs.

  “Hey, Alexi.” Zane regarded me somberly as I limped to the altar. “That uh… that looks like it hurts.”

  “I don’t want to know.” I zipped up the bottom of the body bag, struggling one-handed to put the unconscious man’s feet back inside. “We need to milk Vanya for everything he’s got. I put a lot of information together tonight… but I can’t explain most of it.”

  He stared at me suspiciously, soulfully, and then jerked his shoulders in a restless shrug. “Fine. But we want to know what the fuck we burst in on.”

  “I was hoping for something less arcane.” I hobbled to the head of the bodybag and fumbled the zipper it with my better hand. I was shaking so hard that it took more than one try, an attempt which was not aided by Binah, who batted at the zipper as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “We should… ah…”

  “What?” Zane frowned.

  Tongue-tied, suddenly hot with mingled wonder and confusion, I couldn’t reply. The body bag was opened to chest height, and I’d pushed the plastic back to reveal the most beautiful man I had ever seen.

  Chapter 31

  Angkor was still deeply unconscious, and in remarkably good condition for someone who had been struck in the head hard enough to knock him out for this length of time. His features were strong, fox-like, the lines of his skull spare, his face somehow both utterly masculine and utterly feminine at the same time. His skin was the color of rich amber; his lips were full, his upturned throat long and gracile. And that was where I got stuck, not because of his beauty, but because of the collar. He had a narrow, seamless glass band welded around his neck. It superficially resembled the hazed glass of the knife the priest had passed to Mason, but it wasn’t as brittle-looking as the dagger. I touched it, and an unpleasant sensation vibrated up through the tips of my fingers. It was magically active.

  The only sign of injury was the powdery residue of dried blood – a lot of it. But Angkor had few cuts or bruises, and instead of the smell of filth, all I could smell was flowers. With the smell came a memory. Zarya. Zarya had smelled like this… a scent like mingled jasmine and temple incense, a scent that transfigured to a tactile sensation in the mouth. A deep, bright, vibrant blue scent, holy and inhuman.

  “My GOD,” I whispered, still staring down at him. “Is this Angkor? Your mage?”

  “Yeah.” Zane was looking between him and me with an odd expression that I couldn’t read. His gaze swept over me, lingering on the bristling shards sticking out from the front of my body, and then down. “Why?”

  “I was just wondering.” I flushed as I pushed back some of Angkor’s hair, thick and silky even through gloves, and found the site of a skull fracture. “He’s badly injured… or he was. I was sure I heard one of the byki crack his head against the car.”

  Angkor did not stir at our talk of him, though the lump on his head was continuing to shrink slowly as we watched. It was so gradual that you couldn’t see it, but for a man with hands as sensitive as mine, I could feel the tissues shifting slightly when I took the glove off and pressed my bare fingers in around it. He still had a pulse, which I also felt. Slow and steady.

  “I can’t carry him,” I said. The admission
was embarrassing, the kind of shame that sucked a little more strength out of my already weakened body.

  “I’m surprised you can carry yourself. I’ll take him,” Zane said. He made a shooing motion as he advanced, and rolled Angkor’s prone form into his arms with a grunt. This other Phitometrist couldn’t have weighed that much… a hundred and sixty, at most. What I had seen of his body was perfect: lean and long, muscular, broad-shouldered. As Zane slung him up, one of his hands fell from the side of the open body bag. I could only see the highlights and shadows of his fingers in the fading moonlight, but my mouth turned dry. I had to look away, pulse hammering, as Zane swept past and I trailed him with my cat and a deepening sense of confusion and baseless discomfort.

  “You… uhh… you have glass sticking out of your chest,” Zane said.

  “Please. Really. I don’t want to know.” I was struggling not to stare at my throbbing hand, my throbbing arm, my thigh and abdomen and chest. There was no point looking. “Get me home. I’ll fix it.”

  “No, hell no. You need to get to the ER. Can you walk?”

  It took a few syrupy moments before I could process what he said, form a reply, and then speak. In light of the argument, I was still curt. “Why would I pay someone ten-thousand dollars for something I could do myself?”

  He blanched. “You don’t have insurance?”

  “What? You mean like ‘injuries gained during violent criminal acts’ coverage on the Illegal Wizard Plan?” I made a sound of disgust. “Give me your arm and get me to the GOD-damned car.”

  Ovar and the men outside were gone: Sent packing, no doubt, by the arrival of three bullet-proof big cats. There were no bodies outside. They hadn’t been killed: they’d fled.

  The long road back to the street was agonizing, and by the time I eased into the back seat of Duke’s Buick, every joint and muscle in my body was shrieking and stiff. Duke was half-dressed, pale and shivering as he recovered in the passenger’s side. His arm was pressed in against his ribs. Talya was in the driver’s seat, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel, a sawn-off shotgun lying across her lap.

  “You told me not to worry, Rex.” Her voice was high and thin with fear. “But I worried. I worried a lot.”

  “Given the circumstances, I’m not complaining.” I was breathing heavily, but as long as the shards didn’t move too much, I wasn’t going to bleed to death. Carefully, I eased into the back seat. “I figured out that the senior management of my old Organization were all tied up in this TVS cult.”

  “The cops are going to be all over this tomorrow,” Duke wheezed.

  “I doubt it. The cult leader will tell Nicolai what happened, and Nicolai will clean it up.” I was parched, aching for want of water, but there was no way to hurry things. Jenner was stuffing Vanya into the trunk by herself, his cursing punctuated by the smack of her fist into his flesh and the resulting yelps of pain. I heard her close the lid down on him, and then she peeled around the end of the car to get her clothes. She dressed, then took Angkor while Zane did the same. They then carefully got inside, laying the bodybag across their laps.

  Now that the battle was over, I was in terrible pain. Wracking, awful pain. With gritted teeth, I eyed the shard buried in the palm of my right hand. The leather had stopped it partway, but there was still half an inch of improvised skewer trapped between the tendons of my index and middle fingers. I couldn’t move them. The glass had to stay until I had antibiotics, painkillers, and the tools to safely stop the bleeding.

  “You still alive, Rex?” Jenner glanced over me, then arched an eyebrow.

  “Yes.” I tried to sit back, but no matter what I tried, something was inevitably driven deeper into my body.

  She licked her lips, suddenly downcast. “You… see any reason that Mason was there with those freaks? Did they have him tied up, or anything?”

  “I wish I could say that he’d been captured,” I said. “He was unfettered. The ritual was some kind of initiation for Vanya. He was just standing there, watching it.”

  Jenner said nothing for some time. Talya reversed all the way down the drive and turned onto the street, an arm over the back of the driver’s seat and one hand on the wheel. She was gentle enough that I only winced a little.

  “That ain’t my old man,” Jenner said, once we were on the street. “That thing I fought. It was wearing his skin, but that ain’t Mason.”

  “Can’t disagree, Prez.” Zane was leaning against the window looking out. “What the hell can turn a Weeder into something… someone who looks and acts like that?”

  “Morphorde,” Jenner said. “I don’t know what kind. John or Michael would have known.”

  Zane grunted, and looked back at me over Jenner’s shoulders. “Why are we taking this guy? And what’s his name?”

  “Vanya,” I replied, trying to breathe through the pain. The air in the car was close with the smell of blood and bodies in need of food, and I was momentarily aware that I was bleeding in the presence of three hungry big cats and… whatever Talya was. “He was in photos we found on computer. Vanya Kostyovych Kazopov… he is the Kommandant of Red Hook operation.”

  “Wait. He’s the boss of the fucking Russian Mafia?” Jenner turned on me, her eyes wide and white.

  “Not top boss. He is… middle management.” My English was failing me. I had to be hurt quite badly for my English to go. “Still important. Still pedirasti.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” Jenner scrunched her hands into her face, and made a sound of frustration. “You know if any if that super-Spook can track him to the clubhouse?”

  “I have no earthly idea,” I replied. My voice sounded strained, even to me. The punctures were oozing, leaking blood under my clothes. “Depends… on what type of mage the Deacon is.”

  “The Deacon?” Zane echoed.

  “That is what Vanya called him. He’s a… Temporalist, I think. Time mage.” I thought back to Kutkha’s instruction on the basic categories of Phitometry. “And evil magic, Pravamancy. Maybe Inotropy, magic with gravity. He’s surely an archmage.”

  Jenner rubbed her hands. “Well, we’re going to have to go to Strange Kitty to pick up your medical supplies, and then you’re going to a safehouse. You, Duke, and Talya can babysit Lord Lardass and Sleeping Beauty while we meet with Ayashe about those photos. We can release your chubby friend into her custody after an interview or two.”

  “Me?” Talya squeaked.

  “What? It’s a safehouse. It’s a house that’s safe. I’ll send a couple guys with you to watch the place while you soften this guy up.”

  “I have work tomorrow!”

  Jenner sighed and rolled her eyes. “Come on, kid. You chose to sign on to the Tigers. This your job now, until we approve your petition.”

  Talya stiffened in her seat. “Petition?”

  “Yeah. You think you can just stroll into the club because you’re John’s Kid Wonder? You’re a petitioner right now. I ain’t even taught you how to ride a bike yet.”

  “I grew up in the country. I know how to ride a motorcycle,” Talya replied, huffing her cheeks.

  Jenner laughed, but compared to her usual shameless, raucous laugh, it was muted and stiff. “I mean a real bike, not one of those shitty little Russian putt-putts. We’ll build you a chopper that’s better than any vibrator you’ll ever own. It’ll hum so hard it’ll send you straight to Heaven.”

  “Oh my god, Jenner.” Talya’s accent finally bled through to her otherwise-perfect English. “Shut up.”

  “What? You haven’t ever gone and polished the pearl in public?”

  “Polish the- No! Jenner, no!”

  It bought a chuckling wheeze out of Duke, folded up beside her, and even a rueful smile from Zane.

  We dropped Jenner off at Strange Kitty, got our things, and headed east and north. The safehouse was a tattoo parlor close to Strange Kitty, a small store on an unquiet street in Williamsburg. ‘Hand of Glory’ was written in looping font on the glass. The place was a bit nicer than t
he Bronx, in that most of the buildings hadn’t been set on fire at some point in the previous decade, but every window had bars and every storefront here had roller shutters with large, effective padlocks.

  We pulled up at the curb: us in the big powder-blue Buick, Zane in another, darker blue car, and two other Tigers on their bikes, neither of whom wore the Big Cat Crew patch that identified the shapeshifters of the gang. With more room in the back, we’d brought my surgery kit with us. Talya carried it one-handed, the shotgun clutched in the other. She opened the path ahead for us all, as Duke took Angkor, I took myself and my cat, and the other three Tigers quickly and discreetly dragged Vanya – gagged and bound – from the trunk and inside the parlor.

  “He goes downstairs, we go upstairs,” Zane said. “Go treat Rex and Angkor. We’ll take this guy down and chain him up.”

  Vanya mumbled something dark and unintelligible, struggling as he was hauled off towards the back of the parlor and out of sight. Talya let us into a stairwell leading up to the next floor, a door that had once been green, but that was now a leprous mix of flaking colors and exposed wood. We entered a narrow L-shaped hall that smelled like old cigarettes and unwashed laundry. All of the rooms were to the left of the entry: a tiny open den with a kitchen connected by an arched doorway, two dingy bedrooms with fold-out beds, and an equally close and sweaty bathroom. That was where I directed Talya to place my tools.

  “Home sweet home,” She trilled. She set the surgery kit down with a thump. “Do you need anything?”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “But I can’t undress while you’re here. Send Duke to check in a couple minutes. If I’m dead, you know I cut something important.”

  Her lips pursed for a moment, before she silently ‘Oh’d and then turned and left without another word.